ICTD Work, Plus mFeel : improving communication in resource-poor settings

This issue's Works-In-Progress department has four entries related to the issue's theme, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD). They are “Sustainable ICT in Agricultural Value Chains”, “Measuring Social Inclusion in Primary Schools”, “An Architecture for Green Mobile Computation”, and “Improving Communication in Resource-Poor Settings”. A fifth entry, “mFeel: An Affective Mobile System”, covers the mFeel mobile system, which combines context awareness with affective and cognitive techniques.

Leader Rural Development Program in Spain: Profile and Functions of Workers in Local Action Groups.

Occupations in the labor market are linked with to a minimum basic training and other capacities. Hired workers should be able to accomplish required functions related to their specific job. Regarding the rural development labor market, local action groups? workers have defined performance areas?projects, strategy, organization and training & market?but specific functions within each of these areas are not as clearly defined. Neither both, basic training and capacities needed to perform each job profile within the local action group are defined. This communication analyses training and other capacities linked to each of the job profiles within the local action group. Functions within each of the performance areas previously defined are also analyzed regarding the job profiles.

Identifying Topics in Social Media Posts using DBpedia

This paper describes a method for identifying topics in text published in social media, by applying topic recognition techniques that exploit DBpedia. We evaluate such method for social media in Spanish and we provide the results of the evaluation performed.

Integration of congestion pricing and intertemporal preference rate in social welfare function

Assessing social benefits in transport policy implementation has been studied by many researchers using theoretical or empirical measures. However, few of them measure social benefit using different discount rates including the inter-temporal preferences rate of users, the private investment discount rate and the inter-temporal preferences rate of the government. In general, the social discount rate used is the same for all social actors. Therefore, this paper aims to assess a new method by integrating different types of discount rate belonging to different social actors in order to measure the real benefits of each actor in the short, medium and long term. A dynamic simulation is provided by a strategic Land-Use and Transport Interaction (LUTI) model. The method is tested by optimizing a cordon toll scheme in Madrid considering socio- economic efficiency and environmental criteria. Based on the modified social welfare function (WF), the effects on the measure of social benefits are estimated and compared with the classical WF results as well. The results of this research could be a key issue to understanding the relationship between transport system policies and social actors' benefits distribution in a metropolitan context. The results show that the use of more suitable discount rates for each social actor had an effect on the selection and definition of optimal strategy of congestion pricing. The usefulness of the measure of congestion toll declines more quickly overtime.

Integration of congestion pricing and intertemporal preferences rate integration in social welfare function

Many researchers have used theoretical or empirical measures to assess social benefits in transport policy implementation. However, few have measured social benefits by using discount rates, including the intertemporal preference rate of users, the private investment discount rate, and the intertemporal preference rate of the government. In general, the social discount rate used is the same for all social actors. This paper aims to assess a new method by integrating different types of discount rates belonging to different social actors to measure the real benefits of each actor in the short term, medium term, and long term. A dynamic simulation is provided by a strategic land use and transport interaction model. The method was tested by optimizing a cordon toll scheme in Madrid, Spain. Socioeconomic efficiency and environmental criteria were considered. On the basis of the modified social welfare function, the effects on the measure of social benefits were estimated and compared with the classical welfare function measures. The results show that the use of more suitable discount rates for each social actor had an effect on the selection and definition of optimal strategy of congestion pricing. The usefulness of the measure of congestion toll declines more quickly over time. This result could be the key to understanding the relationship between transport system policies and the distribution of social actors? benefits in a metropolitan context.

Methods and Techniques for Segmentation of Consumers in Social Media

Los medios sociales han revolucionado la manera en la que los consumidores se relacionan entre sí y con las marcas. Las opiniones publicadas en dichos medios tienen un poder de influencia en las decisiones de compra tan importante como las campañas de publicidad. En consecuencia, los profesionales del marketing cada vez dedican mayores esfuerzos e inversión a la obtención de indicadores que permitan medir el estado de salud de las marcas a partir de los contenidos digitales generados por sus consumidores. Dada la naturaleza no estructurada de los contenidos publicados en los medios sociales, la tecnología usada para procesar dichos contenidos ha menudo implementa técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial, tales como algoritmos de procesamiento de lenguaje natural, aprendizaje automático y análisis semántico. Esta tesis, contribuye al estado de la cuestión, con un modelo que permite estructurar e integrar la información publicada en medios sociales, y una serie de técnicas cuyos objetivos son la identificación de consumidores, así como la segmentación psicográfica y sociodemográfica de los mismos. La técnica de identificación de consumidores se basa en la huella digital de los dispositivos que utilizan para navegar por la Web y es tolerante a los cambios que se producen con frecuencia en dicha huella digital. Las técnicas de segmentación psicográfica descritas obtienen la posición en el embudo de compra de los consumidores y permiten clasificar las opiniones en función de una serie de atributos de marketing. Finalmente, las técnicas de segmentación sociodemográfica permiten obtener el lugar de residencia y el género de los consumidores. ABSTRACT Social media has revolutionised the way in which consumers relate to each other and with brands. The opinions published in social media have a power of influencing purchase decisions as important as advertising campaigns. Consequently, marketers are increasing efforts and investments for obtaining indicators to measure brand health from the digital content generated by consumers. Given the unstructured nature of social media contents, the technology used for processing such contents often implements Artificial Intelligence techniques, such as natural language processing, machine learning and semantic analysis algorithms. This thesis contributes to the State of the Art, with a model for structuring and integrating the information posted on social media, and a number of techniques whose objectives are the identification of consumers, as well as their socio-demographic and psychographic segmentation. The consumer identification technique is based on the fingerprint of the devices they use to surf the Web and is tolerant to the changes that occur frequently in such fingerprint. The psychographic profiling techniques described infer the position of consumer in the purchase funnel, and allow to classify the opinions based on a series of marketing attributes. Finally, the socio-demographic profiling techniques allow to obtain the residence and gender of consumers.